Antje Weitzel directs the artistic program and vision of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a role she has held since 2024.

Künstlerhaus Bethanien was established in 1974. Today, it is one of the oldest and most renowned artist-in-residence programs worldwide, offering artists from all corners of the globe the opportunity to live, work, and present their projects in Berlin. It is a place where art is created, dialogue takes shape, and ideas connect across borders. Künstlerhaus Bethanien understands itself as a platform for reflection, exchange, and social engagement. Each year, the International Studio Programme brings together over forty artists from around the world, offering them the opportunity to present their work through exhibitions, open studios, and events to a wide-ranging audience. These intercultural exchanges ignite new perspectives and fuel innovative artistic practices.

Since taking on the role of artistic director, Antje Weitzel has launched a long-term transformation project, Becoming B, which reimagines Künstlerhaus Bethanien as a dynamic space for exchange, artistic production, and presentation. Together with artists, cultural practitioners, and the Berlin public, the project explores how the institution’s name and identity can continue to evolve. Openness, diversity, and transformation are at the heart of this reflection.

Before leading Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Antje Weitzel worked from 2014 to 2024 as a project manager for the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, where she collaborated closely with internationally recognized curators such as Zasha Colah, Kader Attia, and Gabi Ngcobo. At the same time, she ran the project space uqbar in Berlin-Wedding for many years, curating exhibitions and artistic projects. Her work has also involved collaborations with institutions including the Academy of Arts, Maxim Gorki Theater, nGbK, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, and Galerie im Körnerpark.

Antje Weitzel combines hands-on experience with a commitment to exploring new forms of collaboration between artists, audiences, and institutions. Her focus is less on the institution itself than on creating spaces where art can emerge, develop, and spark broader societal dialogue. Beyond her curatorial work, Antje Weitzel is actively engaged in cultural policy initiatives that strengthen artistic freedom, promote diversity, and foster connections among local and international actors. This engagement shapes her practice as much as it informs the content and direction of her programs.

Originally from Romania, Mihaela Lutea moved from Bucharest to Berlin in 2003. During her studies at the Universität der Künste (UdK), she began collaborating in 2007 with Mihai Pop, Plan B’s co-founder. Soon after, she took on the task of shaping and managing the gallery’s new Berlin branch, which opened in 2008. What began as a collaboration gradually evolved into a long-term commitment. Now a longtime co-owner of the gallery alongside Mihai, Mihaela plays a central role in its direction as well as its daily operations.

Plan B was founded in 2005 in Cluj, at a moment when the local art scene was gaining visibility but still lacked stable platforms for production, research, and international dialogue. The gallery emerged from the desire to create such a platform — one that could tell the story of Romanian art in a broader context. Its program focuses on researching and presenting Romanian art from roughly the past five decades, bringing forward artists whose work had often remained little known outside the country. Alongside this focus, the gallery also represents a selection of international artists, creating a program where different practices and histories can meet and inform each other. 

The Berlin space has played a key role in this. Since 2008, Plan B has maintained a permanent presence in the city, first in a former industrial space on Heidestraße, close to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. From 2012 to 2023, the gallery was based in the courtyard of the former Tagesspiegel building on Potsdamer Straße, a place that became closely associated with its Berlin identity. In spring 2023, Plan B moved to its current home at Strausberger Platz 1, on the ground and first floors of one of the iconic towers designed by architect Hermann Henselmann. 

Although Mihaela Lutea is based in Berlin and Mihai Pop continues to work mainly from Cluj, the gallery functions as a shared project, shaped by the constant movement between these two cities and the conversations that arise from it. Together, they maintain a program that looks both inward and outward: toward Romanian art history, which the gallery works to make visible and accessible, and toward the international scene, where these narratives can be further expanded, questioned, and placed in dialogue.

In 2025, the gallery marked twenty years since its founding with a group exhibition featuring many of its long-term artists, including Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Muresan, Victor Man, and Serban Savu, together with more recent positions from the gallery program like Marieta Chirulescu, Diana Cepleanu, Tincuta Marin, and Anca Munteanu Rimnic. IT'S NO CRIME TO TICKLE TIME — a title borrowed from a work by Navid Nuur — speaks to a sense of time accumulating around the gallery and, as the gallery states, renders a reality in which professional existence begins to be seriously confronted with the passage of time, which both adds value and erodes.

Moiz Zilberman founded Zilberman in 2008 in Istanbul’s historic Mısır Apartment in Beyoğlu. From the outset, the gallery positioned itself as a space for critical reflection and for encounters between local and international practices, developing a programme that bridges diverse voices and narratives.
 
Over the years, Moiz Zilberman has expanded the gallery’s activities to Berlin, where he opened a second space in Charlottenburg in 2016. Alongside its exhibitions in Istanbul and Berlin, the gallery runs a project space in Istanbul and an artist-in-residence programme in Berlin that encourage dialogue, experimentation and research-based practices. Between 2023 and 2025, Moiz Zilberman also operated a temporary gallery in Miami, extending the programme and creating opportunities for artistic exchange. Actively involved in the international art world, he participates in major art fairs and maintains close relationships with collectors, curators, and institutions, continually working to build bridges between different artistic communities.
 
Having grown up in Istanbul and with a background as an industrialist in the automotive sector, Moiz Zilberman draws on his long-standing engagement as a collector and gallerist to support initiatives that promote education, public engagement, and collaboration. This commitment is also reflected in the activities of the gallery: each exhibition is accompanied by a publication, and the gallery regularly hosts artist talks, performances, and catalogue launches. He also established the Zed Grant (2011–2016), an annual award that helped artists produce new work and address social and political concerns.
 
At the heart of Moiz Zilberman’s approach is a belief in openness, curiosity, and shared responsibility. His vision of the gallery is one where established and emerging artists coexist, artistic risk is welcomed, and new perspectives are encouraged. Operating between Istanbul and Berlin, he remains committed to expanding the gallery’s role in supporting artistic practice and fostering critical engagement across diverse cultural settings.

Susanne Prinz is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Since 2010 she has directed the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, which she has developed into an active platform for contemporary art, discursive formats, and spatial research. Founded in 2002 to address the architectural and social transformations of post-reunification Berlin. The Kunstverein produces one major public installation annually, several site-specific projects, as well as exhibitions in its own space which only recently moved to a bigger location in a prefab building on the square. It positions itself primarily as a platform for the Berlin art scene, presenting renowned and emerging local artists while fostering dialogue with international partners, and has realised projects among others by Clegg & Guttmann, Michael Sailstorfer, Eva Grubinger, and Raphaela Vogel.⁠
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Prinz’s curatorial focus lies on art in public space, time-based interventions, and speculative models of social organisation. Since 2020 she participats in SPACEX – Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange, a European research and exhibition collaboration linking more than twenty universities and cultural institutions, including the RCA London and UNIARTS Helsinki. The project investigates how artistic and architectural spatial practices can instigate public exchange and promote empathetic forms of living together.⁠
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Alongside her curatorial work, Prinz has taught at art academies in Berlin, Kassel, Salzburg, Linz, Vienna, London, and Montpellier. She is currently developing Gathering Forest / Samla Skog, a collaborative project between Berlin and Stockholm exploring shared ecological and social imaginaries.⁠

Antonia Alampi is a curator, writer, and institution builder. Since 2020, she has been the Founding Artistic and Executive Director of Spore Initiative in Berlin, where she leads the organization’s artistic vision, curatorial methodologies, and institutional development. Her work at Spore includes curating and overseeing long-term, process-driven exhibitions while shaping an ecosystem grounded in community-rooted knowledge, intergenerational learning, and ecological practices.

Her curatorial trajectory spans more than a decade of institutional and collaborative work, including roles at SAVVY Contemporary, sonsbeek20→24, Extra City Kunsthal, and Beirut in Cairo. She has curated solo exhibitions of Ibrahim Mahama, Jasmina Metwaly, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jérôme Bel, and others, alongside group exhibitions addressing redistribution, toxicity, cultural infrastructures, and speculative futures.

Deeply invested in the politics and potential of institutions, she co-founded Toxic Commons and co-initiated Future Climates, both platforms addressing structural conditions within the arts and environmental justice. From 2022 to 2024, she served on the jury of the Italian Council, the Ministry of Culture’s primary grant-making program for international art, research, and curatorial projects. She regularly serves on juries and advisory boards in Italy, Germany, and beyond.

Her work is grounded in the belief that curating is not only about exhibition-making, but about shaping the conditions—material, institutional, and affective—through which cultural work is hosted, produced, sustained and distributed.

Maike Steinkamp is an art historian and curator based in Berlin. Since 2018, she has been responsible for postwar 20th-century art at the Neue Nationalgalerie, where she oversees both the museum’s core collection from the second half of the 20th century and the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, with its key focus on Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Her curatorial practice is deeply informed by a commitment to critically engaging with modernism and its legacies, with particular attention to underrepresented artistic voices. Central to her work is the visibility of women artists as well as artistic positions from the former GDR and Eastern Europe—regions and perspectives still often marginalized in canonical art history narratives.

Steinkamp has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions. Among her recent projects are the first major German retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (with Irina Hiebert Grun), and an exhibition honoring Judit Reigl, the Hungarian-French artist and pivotal yet often overlooked figure of Art Informel. In the large-scale collection presentation "Extreme Tension. Art between Politics and Society" (2023-25, with Marta Smolińska and Joachim Jäger), she explored artistic responses to political systems, with an emphasis on Cold War-era developments in Eastern Europe and the role of female perspectives within them. Her next projects are committed to “Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning. Networks of Surrealism. Provenances from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection” (fall/winter 2025/26) and Constantin Brancusi (spring/summer 2026). 

Prior to her role at the Neue Nationalgalerie, she was a curator at Stiftung Arp e.V. (Berlin/Rolandswerth), where she focused on the legacies of Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, including curating exhibitions such as “A-Geometry. Hans Arp and Poland” (National Museum Poznań, 2017) and “Breaking into a New Dimension. The Artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp” (ZAMEK, Poznań, 2019). She also contributed to curatorial projects at the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Academically, Steinkamp held a long-term position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg (2005–2012), and served as a Visiting Professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts (2009). Her scholarly work and curatorial research as well as her numerous publications and exhibition catalogues intersect through a strong focus on the cultural politics of the 20th century, including themes of exile, totalitarianism, and the contested narratives of modernism.

Catherine Nichols is an internationally acclaimed arts and literary scholar, curator and writer, whose work spans contemporary art, cultural history, and interdisciplinary research. Born and raised in Australia, Nichols pursued studies in literature and cultural theory, fields that shaped her interdisciplinary approach to curating. Since 1999 she has been living in Berlin where she completed her doctorate in 2001 with a dissertation on German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger. 

Nichols has curated an extensive range of cultural history exhibitions at institutions across Germany, addressing topics spanning from the Reformation to the passions, from the sun to sexuality. She has also organised numerous monographic and thematic art exhibitions, many of them in collaboration with others. These include Beuys: We are the Revolution (2008), The End of the 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come (2013) and Capital: Debt – Territory – Utopia (2016) for the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin (in collaboration with Eugen Blume); and Everyone is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys (in collaboration with Isabelle Malz and Eugen Blume) at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. In 2022, Nichols served as creative mediator for the European Nomadic Biennial Manifesta 14 Prishtina, titled it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise. From 2019 to 2021, she co-led beuys 2021: 100 Jahre Joseph Beuys, a critical enquiry into the legacy of German artist Joseph Beuys, alongside Eugen Blume. Ever since Manifesta 14 Prishtina, Nichols has remained actively engaged with the Kosovo arts and cultural scene. She currently serves on the artistic board and as a member of the archiving transition team of Shtatëmbëdhjetë – Foundation 17.

Nichols is currently the curator of the 18th Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon (2026) and a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Her recent projects at the museum include Petrit Halilaj. An Opera Out of Time (2025), Delcy Morelos. Madre (2025), Alexandra Pirici – Attune (2024), Joseph Beuys – Werke aus der Sammlung der Nationalgalerie (2024), and Nationalgalerie: Eine Sammlung für das 21. Jahrhundert (2023).

Anna Gritz is a Berlin-based art historian and curator. Since 2022, she has been the director of Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, where she has initiated a programmatic reorientation that centers artistic investigations of institutional frameworks. Under her leadership, the institution has increasingly foregrounded intergenerational and interdisciplinary approaches, with a particular emphasis on performative practices and context-responsive exhibitions. The history, architecture, and location of the Haus am Waldsee have become key points of reference in her curatorial approach.

Gritz opened her tenure with Leila Hekmat: Female Remedy (2022), followed by exhibitions such as Margaret Raspé: Automatik (2023), Gisèle Vienne: This Causes Consciousness to Fracture (2024), and a retrospective of Ull Hohn (2025). Her upcoming exhibition on Beverly Buchanan (co-curated with Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers, autumn 2025) will explore questions of racial and societal injustice, continuing her focus on historically underrepresented voices. Other recent highlights include exhibitions by Bruno Pélassy and Jenna Bliss.

Before her current role, Gritz served as curator at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where she presented acclaimed monographic exhibitions by Steve Bishop, Judith Hopf, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amelie von Wulffen, and Atiéna R. Kilfa, as well as group shows such as The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue (2019) and Zeros and Ones (2021), co-curated with Kathrin Bentele and Ghislaine Leung. From 2013 to 2016, she was Curator of Film and Performance at the South London Gallery, commissioning new work by Bonnie Camplin, Jill Magid, and Sidsel Meineche Hansen. Prior to that, she held curatorial positions at the ICA and Hayward Gallery in London. She was curatorial attaché for the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016.

Berlin-born curator Jenny Schlenzka, who specialises in contemporary art, has been Director of the Gropius Bau since September 2023. Prior to that, she spent more than 20 years in New York City, where she ran Performance Space New York from 2017. During her time there, she worked with Donna Haraway, Juliana Huxtable, Mette Ingvartsen, Ligia Lewis, Renata Lucas, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Sarah Michelson, Precious Okoyomon, Sondra Perry and Underground Resistance, among others, integrating artists into all facets of the institution. 

Before heading Performance Space, she developed new exhibition formats for performance at MoMA PS1 in Queens, including the acclaimed Sunday Sessions, a weekly, free-of-charge live programme that brought together artists such as Cyprien Gaillard, Kim Gordon, Cao Fei, Anne Imhof, Joan Jonas, Ragnar Kjartansson, Jutta Koether, Mårten Spångberg, M.I.A., Pope.L, Pussy Riot and Wu-Tang Clan. Prior to that, she served as the first ever curator for performance at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where she helped building the Department of Media and Performance Art. 

Schlenzka’s curatorial and institutional practice centres artists, making them and their work the point of origin and reference of all programming and thematic considerations. She sees contemporary art as a discursive space where current social challenges are being negotiated. Schlenzka’s passions lie in creating impactful exhibitions of contemporary and modern art with high audience appeal and developing performative and transdisciplinary formats, which she will further expand at the Gropius Bau. Dialogue with and openness to a diverse public is a major priority for her: all Berliners should feel excited about visiting the exhibition space – with or without their kids, with or without a degree in art history.Schlenzka’s approach is defined by a curiosity and openness that continually places contemporary art in dialogue with current cultural and social challenges. She lives in Berlin with her two children.

TROPEZ is a platform for contemporary art located in Sommerbad Humboldthain, a public outdoor pool in Berlin-Wedding. Founded in 2017 by Nele Heinevetter, TROPEZ invites international artists each summer to create new works specifically for this unique setting. The result is a playful and thought-provoking programme of installations, performances, talks, concerts, and (children’s) workshops – right alongside swimmers, families, and sunbathers.⁠

Since 2021, TROPEZ has been led by artistic director Sophie Boysen. The project showcases young international artistic positions – often shown in Germany for the first time – and brings contemporary art into direct, uncomplicated contact with a wide audience. Here, contemporary art becomes accessible in an immediate way. Visitors stumble upon artworks between wet towels and lifegued whistles, meeting urgent questions, experimental formats and multi-voiced perspectives in spontaneous, tactile ways: Unlike in conventional exhibition spaces, art here is meant to be used, played with, entered.

This summer’s programme PARASITE embraces disruption as a generative force. Inspired by Michel Serres’ theory of the parasite, it invites artworks to interfere with the pool’s rhythm – from printed inflatables spilling over the lifeguard tower to mysterious transparent lockers or a whole mini golf parcours. 

PARASITE features installations, sculptures, performances, events and workshops by Haseeb Ahmed, Jade Barget, Arthur Chruszcz, Maurin Dietrich, Elena Francalanci, Amine Habki, Melike Kara, Tilhenn Klapper, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Maya Man, Nóra Ó Murchú, Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, Rosanna Marie Pondorf, Susanne Sachsse, SUNDAYS, T Vinoja

More than 30 years ago, a few art-interested young people in the Spreewald region wanted to bring a breath of fresh air into the rural province of Brandenburg. In 1994, they founded the project ROHKUNSTBAU. What originally started as a weekend happening has since become one of the most renowned exhibitions of international contemporary art in Brandenburg.

For about 20 years, Inka Thunecke has been part of the ROHKUNSTBAU team. Initially, the trained literary scholar and historian organized readings as accompanying events for the exhibitions. Today, she is a board member of the Association of Friends of ROHKUNSTBAU and the organizational brain behind the exhibitions. Thunecke also steers the  thematic conception of the exhibitions.

The name ROHKUNSTBAU is itself a work of art. It originates from the first exhibition venue: a concrete hall that had been planned in 1989 for the Workers' Festival of the GDR, but was never completed – in other words, it never advanced beyond the shell construction stage ("Rohbau" in German).

The first ROHKUNSTBAU took place in this hall in Groß Leuthen (Dahme-Spreewald). The idea behind it: to breathe new life into this cultural ruin – and with it, into the rural region – through site-specific art. Many artists embraced this idea and supported the project. After five exhibitions, ROHKUNSTBAU moved to the nearby Schloss Groß Leuthen. Since then, ROHKUNSTBAU has been traveling from castle to castle in Brandenburg, creating novel aesthetic experiences through the contrast between contemporary art and historic architecture – currently at Schloss Altdöbern in the Lusatia region.

soft power is an independent art space and a curatorial project, critically appropriating with its name a political term that describes and uses the influence which “soft” assets such as culture and art can have on political and economic spheres. In addition to exhibitions and other artistic formats that have been taking place in soft power’s exhibition space in a former factory building in Berlin-Tempelhof since 2021, as a Kunstverein with a membership structure, soft power also hosts changing residencies and frequently invites other curators and initiatives to realise projects as part of the programming. In their ongoing collaboration, artistic directors Eva Herrmann and Linnéa Bake are working on critically examining “soft power” as a conceptual framework through curatorial research, practice, teaching and writing – guided by the question how this ambiguous notion can be productively subverted, challenged and reclaimed from various artistic perspectives. 

“In light of the recent and ongoing funding cuts in Berlin and their politically motivated dimension, the importance of this question is becoming increasingly evident”, Herrmann and Bake state. soft power’s basic operational costs are currently funded by the Berlin Senate. “As a non-profit organisation, we depend on public funding structures, which in Germany have long been cherished for their supposed independence from political positioning. In the current political landscape, more than ever we must understand that this is shifting, and find ways to circumnavigate, or undermine, these structures – which is in fact something that we critically, sometimes ironically, allude to with our name, soft power. If anything, the situation encourages us to be more resourceful as we attempt to build an alternative institutional model, and to keep enabling pluralistic discourse.” 

soft power, Teilestr. 11–13, 12099 Berlin

Save the date for soft power's upcoming exhibition in Berlin:
Selin Davasse: Corpus Iuris Artis: II. The Hearing, runnning from August 30, 2025 until September 14, 2025

Axel Wieder has been director of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art since 2024. From 2018 to 2024, he has been director of Bergen Kunsthall where he produced an interdisciplinary program with an international focus and local roots together with his team, which encompassed exhibitions, live projects. Previously, Wieder was director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm (2014–2018) as well as Head of Programmes at Arnolfini in Bristol (2012–2014). He was responsible for the program of Ludlow 38 – Goethe Institute in New York from 2010 to 2011 and artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart from 2007 to 2010. In 1999, he founded Pro qm, a bookshop and discourse platform, together with Katja Reichard and Jesko Fezer in Berlin. Axel Wieder studied art history and cultural studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Cologne. He has held teaching appointments at various universities and art academies, and publishes in magazines and anthologies.

In April 2025, Anna Schneider assumed the directorship of DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. As director and curator, she is dedicated to cultivating a vibrant space for critical thinking, dialogue, and inspiration at MINSK. With a background in postcolonial theory, her work focuses on engaging with cultural and social histories as well as their influence on the creation, form, and significance of artistic expression.

Anna Schneider has worked as a curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich since 2012, where she has realized numerous exhibitions and publications with artists such as Theaster Gates, Meredith Monk, Michael Armitage, and Frank Bowling. She is the co-founder of the Hamid Zénati Estate whose extensive collection is on view at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt until mid January 2025. Schneider is also the co-founder of the Hamid Zénati Estate, whose extensive collection was shown at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt and in the exhibition Soft Power at DAS MINSK.

Anna Schneider completed a Master’s degree in Exhibition and Museum Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright Scholar in 2009. Prior to this, she obtained degrees in Cultural Management (Kulturarbeit) from the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (2007) and in graphic design from the Städtischen Berufsfachschule für Mode- und Kommunikationsgrafik in Munich.

Zasha Colah (Mumbai, India, 1982) is curator of the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Her exhibitions explore artistic imagination, humor and oral history, often under conditions of sustained oppression. Colah is Artistic Director of Ar/Ge Kunst (with Francesca Verga, Bolzano, since 2023), lecturer in Curatorial Studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan, since 2018), as well as part of the editorial board of GeoArchivi (director: Marco Scotini/Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti). Colah was a member of Archive (Berlin/Dakar/Milan, 2020–23), a community of practice, and co-founded the Clark House Initiative (Mumbai, 2010–22), a collaborative of artists and curators concerned with ideas of freedom. Her doctorate addressed illegality and meta-exhibition practices in Indo-Myanmar since the 1980s (Sapienza—Università di Roma, 2020). She co-curated the 3rd Pune Biennale with Luca Cerizza (2017), and was part of the curatorial team of the 2nd Yinchuan Biennale, led by Marco Scotini (2018).

Valentina Viviani (Córdoba, Argentina, 1991) is assistant curator of the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Viviani is an artist and curator, part of Poly Marchantia, a feminist artist collective focused on ways of enacting plant thinking and entering in conversation with spaces understood as ecosystems. As an artist she has made “The Missing Forest”, a performative walk (Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano, 2023), “Quali voci, quali corpi, quali storie?” with Poly Marchantia collective (as part of the SITU residency program, Militello in Val di Catania, 2021), and “Atlas, fragmentos para la producción del Paisaje” (Córdoba, 2017), among others. She collaborated with Zasha Colah to curate “The Scorched Earthly” (221A Vancouver, 2021–22), and “Extraneous” (EXILE gallery, for “Curated by” festival, Vienna, 2022). Also, she taught in and coordinated “Mater Matuta”, the master´s program of curatorial practice and philosophy of the Mediterranean (ABADIR Academy, Sicily, 2023–24).

The 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art takes place from June 14 to September 14, 2025 and is curated by Zasha Colah. Valentina Viviani is Assistant Curator.

Sophia Greiff is a curator and co-head of programming at C/O Berlin where she curated the exhibitions Daido Moriama . Retrospective (2023), Mary Ellen Mark . Encounters (2023), Laia Abril . On Rape (2024), Tyler Mitchell . Wish This Was Real (2024) and most recently Sam Youkilis . Under The Sun (2025). She is currently curating a comprehensive exhibition by film and media artist Julian Rosefeldt, which will open on May 23, 2025 and will be on view at C/O Berlin until September 16.

Previously, she was a graduate research assistant in the Visual Journalism and Documentary Photography program at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She co-edited image/con/text: Documentary Practices Between Journalism, Art and Activism (Reimer, 2020) and Images in Conflict/Bilder im Konflikt (Jonas, 2018). For many years, Greiff co-curated the Fotodoks Festival for Contemporary Documentary Photography. As a Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Foundation scholar, she worked at Munich Stadtmuseum, Museum Folkwang in Essen, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others. A current doctoral candidate at Folkwang University of the Arts, she is examining research-based photobooks.

Kathleen Reinhardt, the director of the Georg Kolbe Museum, started her institutional program with the exhibitions Lin May Saeed: The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise, A Dialogue with Renée Sintenis (2023) and Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance (2024). From 2016–2022, she was curator for contemporary art at the Albertinum (Dresden State Art Collections), facilitating new collection acquisitions, organizing multiple solo and group presentations and publishing artist focused publications, such as Slavs and Tatars. Made in Dschermany (2018), For Ruth, the Sky in Los Angeles. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz (2019) or Hassan Khan. I saw the world collapse and it was only a word (2019). In 2020/21 she curated the group exhibition 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis, and initiated the multi-platform research and exhibition project Revolutionary Romances. Transcultural Art Histories in the GDR (2019-2024). She holds an PhD in African American art history from FU Berlin, teaches at art academies internationally and her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s–1980s (Walker Art Center) and magazines like Art Margins and Kaleidoscope. She is interested in the museum as enabler for artistic research and production, the discursive quality of collections bound to a certain time and/or historical and ideological narrative, and the engagement of feminist thought in the rethinking of art institutions. 

Galerie Friese was founded by Klaus Gerrit Friese in Stuttgart in 2008 and moved to Fasanenplatz in Berlin in 2015 - a center of artistic modernism since the beginning of the 20th century. The focus of the program lies on painting and drawing positions from classical modernism to the present day. Among the estates represented are Willi Baumeister, Norbert Kricke, Dieter Krieg, Georg Karl Pfahler and Walter Stöhrer. The gallery's contemporary positions include Franziska Holstein, Karin Kneffel, Anna Leonhardt, Thomas Müller, Cornelius Völker and Ambra Durante. In addition, Galerie Friese offers a platform for transdisciplinary perspectives on art and has shown drawings by Peter Handke, the Berlin philosopher of religion Klaus Heinrich and, most recently, an exhibition curated by the writer Simon Strauß on the subject of “Neoromanticism”. This year, the gallery is celebrating its tenth anniversary in Berlin as well as the collaboration of Klaus Gerrit Friese, Ann-Kathrin Wegener and Teresa Karst as a team.

The Julia Stoschek Foundation's Berlin space, opened in 2016, is dedicated to showcasing time-based media art. Located in the former Czechoslovakian Cultural Center of the GDR, the venue exhibits works from the Julia Stoschek Collection, which includes over 1,000 time-based media art pieces and is one of the largest private collections of its kind. Founded by the renowned art collector Julia Stoschek, the foundation provides a dynamic platform for media artists in Berlin. It hosts various exhibitions, artist talks, and educational programs, making it a vibrant hub for contemporary art enthusiasts. Its commitment to preserving and showcasing time-based media art underscores the foundation's significance in the global art community.

Founded in 1991 and directed by Marie-Blanche Carlier and Ulrich Gebauer the gallery promotes international contemporary art and currently represents over 30 international artists. The program veers towards aesthetic and conceptual research in the fields of sculpture, installation, film, photography, painting, and drawing.⁠
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Rather than following a specific theoretical framework the gallery offers their artists a professional space to experiment. This allows for a spectrum of positions to be shown and gives the program its independent profile. The ample exhibition space in the Markgrafenstrasse 67, a former industrial shedhall located in the historical press area allows the gallery to show large-scale installations in a museum like setting. In March 2019 the gallery opened a new location in Madrid.⁠
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The gallery has proven to be a key platform for the artists’ development by producing crucial exhibitions for their career. A great number of the artists of the gallery have participated in major biennials and international exhibitions as well as having significant solo exhibitions in major international museums.⁠

Founded in 1903, the Deutscher Künstlerbund is one of the oldest artist associations in Germany. Today, it boasts over 800 renowned visual artists as members. The association serves as a dynamic platform for artistic exchange and critical discourse. Through active involvement in selection committees, advisory boards, and panels that contribute to legislative processes, it advocates for the interests of artists working across Germany.

In addition to its advocacy efforts, the Deutscher Künstlerbund organizes a range of events at its Berlin exhibition space, welcoming both members and international guests. It also coordinates exhibitions, symposia, and colloquia nationwide, focusing on socio-politically relevant topics.

To mark its 75th anniversary of re-establishment, the project »Auf den Spuren Bildender Künstlerinnen« in 2024 and 2025 aims to increase the visibility of women artists and highlight their contributions to the history of the association. The project culminates in a major exhibition at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen. The kickoff show, I’m Sorry, I Can’t Help You, by Ngozi Ahaj Schommers, awardee of the HAP Grieshaber Preis der VG Bild-Kunst, is currently being hosted at the Deutscher Künstlerbund’s exhibition space in Berlin.

The ifa Gallery Berlin, founded after the reunification, has been located on Linienstraße in Berlin Mitte since 2001. It is one of the two galleries of the ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) that show contemporary art from a global perspective in Berlin and Stuttgart. The ifa galleries invite visitors to view and reinterpret the world from diverse perspectives. At the centre of the galleries' work lies the development of long-term relationships with artists, partners and visitors. The galleries aim to be a place of mutual exchange and dialogue, serving also as a meeting point and digital platform. Since 2017, the ifa Gallery Berlin has been inviting visitors to engage in a discourse on colonial legacies, movement, migration and the environment with the Untie to Tie project. The ifa Gallery Berlin is led by Alya Sebti and Inka Gressel.

The exhibition Display by artist Sara Ouhaddou explores the relationship between art and craftsmanship and can be seen at ifa Gallery Berlin until the 2nd of February 2025. As an extension of the exhibition, the gallery invites visitors to an open textile workshop from the 20th of November. The workshop is open during the gallery's regular hours to people of all ages – families, enthusiasts and textile fans – and can be used freely without prior registration.

With branches in Berlin and Leipzig, Galerie EIGEN + ART represents more than 37 international artists working in the media of painting, film and video, photography, installation, and sculpture, as well as in the field of Concept Art and Performance. An important interest of the gallery is to accompany the careers of artists from the beginning, long-term and continuously. This is one of the distinctive characteristics of the gallery: many of our artists have been with us since the program was launched and are still represented by us; new generations of artists have joined them.In 1992, the branch at Auguststraße 26 in Berlin was opened, an important step and today a central site of the gallery for an international public.

Gerd Harry Lybke founded the Galerie EIGEN + ART on 10 April 1983 at Körnerplatz 8 in Leipzig in the former East Germany. In the early years, it was an illegal meeting point where exhibitions, Happenings, and Performances were held; but the gallery quickly developed into a well-known address for an ambitious exhibition program, already with the participation of artists who are still represented in the program, like Carsten Nicolai, Neo Rauch, and Olaf Nicolai. Today, EIGEN + ART is the only gallery from the former East Germany that acts internationally.

In March 2012, the gallery opened a third branch, the EIGEN + ART LAB in the former Jewish Girls’ School, just a few steps away from the Berlin gallery. With the founding of the EIGEN + ART LAB, which moved in January 2015 to Torstraße 220 in Berlin, space was created where a next generation of artists could realize their projects in a gallery and exhibition context, establish relationships, and integrate themselves as young positions in the gallery’s program.